Richard Murphy Architects

Area of Expertise: Cultural, educational, high-end residential and working creatively with historic buildings

Richard Murphy OBE is Scotland’s leading architect. Based in Edinburgh, their 27 RIBA awards (more than any other practice in Scotland) have been given for a variety of work: buildings for the arts, housing, health, universities, commercial, and two British embassies.

In addition, they have a particular expertise in the creative re-use or extension of historic buildings and have built in all four countries of the United Kingdom, the Republic of Ireland, Malta, Netherlands, North Macedonia, and Sri Lanka.

Sir Richard McCormac, PPRIBA, wrote “What is formidable about Richard Murphy Architects is the range of building types they have mastered,” a skill recognised by HRH Queen Elizabeth with the awarding of an OBE in 2007. That skill starts by listening carefully to the client, researching and understanding the full context of the building, and paying particular attention to the creative possibilities of energy efficiency.

Phone +44 131 220 6125

Address The Breakfast Mission, 15 Old Fishmarket Close, Edinburgh, EH1 1AE

Website www.richardmurphyarchitects.com

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What is your speciality?

Excellence. We have excelled in domestic architecture, performance spaces and art galleries, educational buildings, and a British embassy. We like to think that our record exhibits an architectural talent that can be applied to any project no matter the learning curve. In fact, we sometimes think that our best designs are often where we have never designed this type of building before.

How do you approach a new design?

Our primary inspiration is people. We like to understand our clients, their problems and aspirations and how a building might work. The greatest compliment we have received from a client is that we are good listeners. For example, for an arts building, we think it is imperative to find a way of dissolving the threshold and enticing the public into the building. That is usually done by the intelligent placing of a café and/or bar to make the building firstly a meeting space. The next step into the space is then far less intimidating. We were delighted when the director Clive Gilman described Dundee Contemporary Arts as “the living room of Dundee.”

Have any clients been inspirational?

A great many. A university vice-chancellor, for example, who took us with him to three successive universities had a number of key ideas: “When a student enters a faculty building, I want them to see everything that is available…Learning comes as much from informal social interaction over a cup of coffee as it does from lecture theatres or seminar rooms” and “I want to see all rooms used all the time.” We built highly innovative and efficient computer libraries, a faculty of educations and a science faculty at Napier, East London and Anglia Ruskin Universities respectively.

How does energy thinking influence your designs?

This is becoming increasingly a fundamental generator of design. Our approach ranges from using a roof angle in a simple house to admit winter sun and shade in the summer, through to the British High Commission, where the whole sectional idea of the building was generated by a wish to induce air movement throughout offices by opening vents and switching off the air conditioning. Richard Murphy’s own house in Edinburgh is full of sliding and pivoting shutters which change the house completely between winter and summer. Above all, we believe that innovative design for energy conservation is fundamental to the design and not something applied later.

How has your academic study of the work of the architect Carlo Scarpa and the books you have written influence your own work?

Scarpa (and William Morris before him) taught that history cannot be reproduced, it is a continuity, with each new generation having the opportunity of expressing themselves. In a historic building, typically one with a new use, the new needs to find an equilibrium with the old, quite often by acts of creative demolition so that the true story of the evolution of the building, almost in the manner of an archaeologist, can clearly be seen and understood. The consequent juxtaposition of new and old should be designed so that each benefit from the presence of the other.